name: Ternary Vocabulary
description: >-
  Core vocabulary and taxonomy for Ternary, the multi-cloud FinOps platform.
  Covers cloud cost management concepts, FinOps practices, commitment types,
  and platform-specific terminology.
created: '2026-05-03'
modified: '2026-05-03'
terms:
  - term: FinOps
    definition: >-
      A financial management discipline and cultural practice for cloud cost
      optimization. Brings together finance, engineering, and business teams to
      make data-driven spending decisions. Ternary is a FinOps Certified Platform.
    tags:
      - Core Concepts
      - Cloud Finance

  - term: Universal Spend Ledger
    definition: >-
      Ternary's proprietary data layer that normalizes cloud billing data from
      multiple providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI) into a consistent, queryable
      format aligned with the FOCUS standard.
    tags:
      - Core Concepts
      - Data Platform

  - term: Anomaly Detection
    definition: >-
      ML-powered identification of unexpected cloud cost spikes or drops.
      Ternary's algorithms establish a baseline from historical spend patterns
      and alert when actual spend deviates significantly.
    tags:
      - Cost Monitoring
      - Machine Learning

  - term: Cost Allocation
    definition: >-
      The process of distributing shared cloud costs across teams, projects, or
      cost centers. Ternary supports proportional, fixed, and even allocation
      methods based on cloud resource labels.
    tags:
      - Cost Management
      - Chargeback

  - term: Cost Center
    definition: >-
      An organizational unit (team, product, department) that is responsible for
      a portion of cloud costs. Ternary maps cloud spend to cost centers using
      labels and allocation rules.
    tags:
      - Cost Management
      - Organization

  - term: Commitment
    definition: >-
      A cloud purchase contract that provides discounted pricing in exchange for
      a usage commitment. Includes Reserved Instances (AWS), Savings Plans (AWS),
      and Committed Use Discounts (GCP).
    tags:
      - Cost Optimization
      - Commitments

  - term: Reserved Instance
    definition: >-
      An AWS commitment type that provides up to 75% discount on EC2, RDS, and
      other services in exchange for a 1-year or 3-year commitment.
    tags:
      - Commitments
      - AWS

  - term: Savings Plan
    definition: >-
      An AWS flexible commitment model that provides discounts on compute usage
      (EC2, Fargate, Lambda) in exchange for a consistent spend commitment.
    tags:
      - Commitments
      - AWS

  - term: Committed Use Discount
    definition: >-
      A GCP commitment type that provides discounts of up to 57% on VM resources
      in exchange for a 1-year or 3-year commitment.
    tags:
      - Commitments
      - Google Cloud

  - term: Commitment Utilization
    definition: >-
      The percentage of a commitment's capacity that is being actively consumed.
      Low utilization indicates over-commitment and wasted spend.
    tags:
      - Commitments
      - Optimization

  - term: Budget
    definition: >-
      A defined cloud spending target for a period (monthly, quarterly, annual).
      Ternary tracks current spend vs budget and sends alerts at configurable
      threshold percentages.
    tags:
      - Budgeting
      - Forecasting

  - term: Forecasting
    definition: >-
      ML-based projection of future cloud spend based on historical usage patterns
      and trends. Ternary forecasts help identify budget overruns before they occur.
    tags:
      - Forecasting
      - Machine Learning

  - term: Cost Anomaly
    definition: >-
      A detected deviation from expected cloud spend. Ternary classifies anomalies
      by severity (low, medium, high, critical) and tracks acknowledgement and
      resolution workflow.
    tags:
      - Cost Monitoring
      - Anomaly Detection

  - term: FOCUS
    definition: >-
      FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification. An open standard for normalizing
      cloud billing data across providers. Ternary aligns its Universal Spend
      Ledger with FOCUS for cross-provider consistency.
    tags:
      - Standards
      - Data Platform

  - term: Kubernetes Cost Allocation
    definition: >-
      Attribution of Kubernetes workload costs (pods, namespaces, deployments)
      to cost centers using pod labels. Ternary uses an agentless monitoring
      approach via GKE, EKS, and AKS native APIs.
    tags:
      - Kubernetes
      - Cost Allocation

  - term: Pod Label
    definition: >-
      A Kubernetes metadata key-value pair attached to pods. Ternary uses pod
      labels to map Kubernetes workload costs to teams and cost centers for
      chargeback and showback.
    tags:
      - Kubernetes
      - Cost Allocation

  - term: Showback
    definition: >-
      The practice of making teams aware of their cloud costs without charging
      them back. The first step in FinOps maturity, increasing cost awareness.
    tags:
      - FinOps
      - Cost Management

  - term: Chargeback
    definition: >-
      The practice of billing teams for their actual cloud consumption. Requires
      accurate cost allocation rules and is a more advanced FinOps practice than
      showback.
    tags:
      - FinOps
      - Cost Management

  - term: Unit Economics
    definition: >-
      Cost metrics normalized by business drivers (e.g., cost per user, cost per
      transaction). Ternary's reporting supports custom unit metrics to connect
      cloud spend to business outcomes.
    tags:
      - Metrics
      - Business Value